This Is Vegan Propaganda (& Other Lies the Meat Industry Tells You)

by Ed Winters

It is currently estimated that animal farming accounts for somewhere between 14.5 per cent and 18 per cent of total emissions.

a Swedish study showed that it was more environmentally friendly to buy tomatoes produced in Spain than purchasing them locally in Sweden. This is because the climate in Spain means that tomatoes can be grown in fields, rather than indoors, whereas in Sweden producing tomatoes requires the burning of fuel and uses ten times more energy.28

This is why hearing farmers say that a plant-based diet is not sustainable because many plant foods are imported is incredibly frustrating. It plays on a preconception that local must be better but completely ignores the science.

An interesting argument sometimes levelled against vegans is that if we stopped breeding the animals that we eat into existence, we would make these species of animals extinct. However, the animals that we consume are selectively bred and often dependent on humans for survival because of this. The fact that they would go extinct without humans just proves that they are not natural animals to begin with.

It is startling that humans only make up 0.01 per cent of the Earth’s total biomass and yet we have caused the loss of 83 per cent of all wild mammals, 80 per cent of marine mammals and half of all plants.

Half of the Earth’s animals are thought to have been lost in the last 50 years alone.

This is a common accusation that vegans face. However, somewhere in the region of 7565 to 80 per cent66 of all the soya that is produced globally is used as animal feed.

There has been some good news. In July 2021, Argentina became the first country in the world to ban salmon farming because of concerns about their environmental impact. Let’s hope other countries follow suit as well.

It is estimated that about 75 per cent of new or emerging infectious diseases in people come from non-human animals,

Interestingly, although the genetic building blocks for the virus originated in bats, without the civet cat link, the virus might never have gained the ability to lock onto the enzyme coating the cells of human lungs.

It is now strongly believed that all influenza A viruses (the type of influenza viruses that have pandemic potential) originate from birds and that the spread of flu from birds to humans first occurred due to the domestication of ducks about 4,500 years ago.

As a result, diseases such as tuberculosis, measles, whooping cough, diphtheria, smallpox influenza,28 the cold virus,29 and the list goes on, are thought to have originated from the domestication of animals, with more spillover events happening all the time.

Whenever there is an outbreak, every bird who could be infected is culled – it was this strategy that stopped the spread of H5N1 back in 1997. So, the current method of control already acknowledges the most important aspect of pandemic prevention: when you remove the animals, you remove the risk.

The scale of disease and contamination in our food supply is so vast and normalised that we often don’t even realise that there is a problem at all.

This became painfully apparent in 2018, when an undercover investigation was carried out into a 2 Sisters Food Group factory in West Bromwich,106 which is the largest supplier of chicken flesh to UK supermarkets and produces one third of all poultry products eaten in the UK. The investigation discovered that the workers there, under instruction from supervisors, had tampered with food safety records, which could have led to consumers being duped into buying flesh that was past its use-by date by switching labels.

On top of this, chickens that had been returned by supermarkets were being repackaged and then sent out again with new use-by dates.

Testing has shown that 60 per cent of pork products, 70 per cent of beef, 80 per cent of chicken products and 90 per cent of turkey products are contaminated with E. coli.

faecal contamination is a huge problem for the meat industry, especially as animals in slaughterhouses often defecate because of the fear they feel. The problem is so common that poultry officials in the USA considered using superglue to seal the anuses of birds in slaughterhouses so that there would be less risk of contamination.

The number of antibiotics that should be used to keep animals alive just long enough so we can kill them is precisely zero.

Whenever a vegan falls ill, non-vegans always blame it on their diet. Have a cold? It’s because you’re vegan. Stomach bug? It’s because you’re vegan. Are you looking tired today? It’s because you’re vegan. Someone even once told me that several work colleagues in their office had come down with the flu but that when they also got it, they were told by co-workers that it must have been because they were vegan.

My own personal experience is of having more energy, better skin, better digestion and an increased feeling of wellbeing since going vegan – but what does the science say?

This is a huge part of the problem: we are taught almost nothing about nutrition, and a huge amount of our perception about food is subsequently created by advertising and marketing, carried out by companies who are trying to sell us something.

According to this narrative, a balanced diet doesn’t involve eating the flesh and secretions of other animals that are eaten around the world – such as camels, dogs, cats, whales, dolphins, horses, guinea pigs, crocodiles, kangaroos, shark fins, turtles, iguanas, monkeys, emus, and so on. Luckily for us, out of the literally thousands of edible animals that we could consume, it’s the four or five animals that have been farmed where we live for hundreds of years, long before we even knew about nutrients, that are the ones important for a ‘balanced diet’.

Protein is made up of amino acids, nine of which are considered essential, meaning they must be acquired through diet. All of the essential amino acids our bodies need can be found in plants,

dairy consumption has been associated with prostate cancer, as was shown in an analysis of 47 studies, incorporating more than 1 million participants, looking at the effects of animal and plant foods on prostate cancer risk. The study found that men who ate the highest amount of dairy products had a 65 per cent higher risk of developing prostate cancer than those consuming the lowest amounts, whereas those who ate plant-based diets had a 36 per cent lower risk.

Studies have shown that up to 40 per cent of people in Western countries have low or marginal B12 status, meaning that inadequate B12 intake is far from only being a vegan problem.

Even grass-fed animals are often supplemented with B12 or cobalt – which is necessary for ruminant animals to produce B12 in their digestive system – because lots of soil is now cobalt-deficient. In essence, the majority of B12 in our diet is coming from a supplement one way or another.

If I had a pound for every time someone told me that veganism is unhealthy because vegans take supplements, I would have enough to a buy a lifetime’s supply of B12. However, the truth is that society has relied on supplementation and fortification for decades, and it’s so normalised and widespread that we don’t even recognise it.

the following supplements are widespread in our food chain: Cow’s milk is often fortified with vitamin D, iodine and vitamin A Soils are often fortified with selenium and cobalt Cereal grain products such as bread and cereals are often fortified with nutrients such as folic acid, riboflavin, niacin, vitamin B6, pantothenic acid, iron, calcium and vitamin D

A plant-based intervention heart trial that was conducted in 2014 involved 198 people who had heart disease being put on a wholefoods plant-based diet. Of the 177 people who stuck with the diet, one of them had a stroke. However, of the 21 people who didn’t stick with the diet, 13 of them suffered

Kaiser Permanente, one of the largest healthcare providers in the USA, has even told physicians to promote plant-based diets to their patients because it is a low-risk intervention that is cost effective and can treat multiple chronic illnesses at the same time.

A young child doesn’t think it’s wrong to hurt a dog because we culturally keep dogs as pets, but as they grow older that’s what we teach them to believe. Likewise, in some areas of the world, children are taught that it’s wrong to kill a cow.

A piglet makes us smile in the same way as a puppy; a little lamb is as cute as a kitten. We even take our children to petting zoos and open farms so that they can bottle-feed baby animals because it makes them, and us, happy. However, the child doesn’t know, and the parent might not realise, that the child is fattening up the animal to be slaughtered.

imagine if the farmer tried to slaughter the animal right there in front of everyone – the child would be traumatised, but, then again, so would most of us. If we saw a chick being thrown into a macerator, we would be devastated. If we saw a piglet being mutilated, we would be deeply upset. If a farmer attempted to kill an animal in front of us, many of us would try to stop them. Yet these things happen every day, and we pay for them to happen. We don’t think about it – we choose not to think about it – because it is out of sight and out of mind.

We form deep psychological defence mechanisms as we grow older, and these industries are able to make great profits doing things we would try to stop if they were happening in our presence.

if dog owners were cutting off their pets’ tails and chopping their teeth out, we would condemn that as being horrific animal abuse. But we do it to pigs and call it high welfare. If someone was killing puppies by thumping their heads against a wall or dislocating their necks, we would call that evil, yet that happens to animals such as piglets and chickens and we call it humane.

especially considering that the number of animals we deem to be ‘food’ is an incredibly small fraction of all the edible animals that exist. A fascinating example of this was the scandal in Europe in 2013 when many beef products, such as burgers and lasagnes, were found to contain horse meat. People in the UK were outraged that they were consuming horses and not cattle, although morally there’s no difference. Horse meat is widely consumed across many areas of Europe, tastes similar to cattle flesh and even has twice as much iron as steak from a cow.

The species of animals we consider to be ‘food animals’ have changed over time. Up until the 1930s, people in the UK did eat horse meat.19 In the 1950s, whale meat was available to buy in the UK and was called ‘whacon’, which the UK government recommended for its high nutritional value.

Today, most British people would baulk at the idea of eating horse or whale flesh.

An argument that is often used to justify eating the animals we do is that we have eaten them for millennia. But the same is also true of dog meat, with dogs being consumed in Germany21 in the early twentieth century, and they are still consumed in rural areas of Switzerland.22 Incidentally, dog meat is high in protein and iron (it too can contain more than beef), an argument that is often used to justify consuming animal flesh

The problem is that once an animal is classified as being ‘food’, the way we think about that animal’s attributes changes.

Imagine how people would react if someone bred dogs into existence, gave them six months of life and then cut their throats with the justification: ‘I gave them a good life, I cut their throat humanely, I like how they taste and they’re a good source of essential nutrients, such as protein and zinc.

Imagine if supermarkets called their meat sections ‘dead animal’ aisles. Or if instead of bacon we bought ‘sliced pig flesh’ and on the packaging it explained the process of how they were gassed to death. By turning animals into objects, classifying them differently and using different words to describe them when they are living and when they are dead, it helps us to avoid the discomfort of thinking of them in gas chambers or hung up on the kill line about to have their throats cut.

These kinds of stories have a huge influence on people’s perception of vegans, to the point where feeding certified class-one carcinogens, such as bacon, to children is seen as being an example of normal parenting but a plant-based diet is seen as child abuse.

Some brands and supermarkets have even created fake farm names, such as Tesco’s ‘Woodside Farms’ and Lidl’s ‘Birchwood Farm’.

it seems peculiar that a packet of ‘meat-free burgers’ would be seen as potentially confusing, whereas a carton of ‘happy eggs’ is perfectly acceptable.

one study that looked at 16 leading US newspapers from 2005 to 2008 identifying 4,500 articles about climate change but only 2.4 per cent of those mentioning the contribution of animal agriculture to the crisis.

We do the same for sporting events as well, with the Super Bowl in the USA being celebrated with the consumption of 1.35 billion chicken wings during the course of the weekend, which means that around 700 million chickens are killed just for a sporting event,1 with a staggering 99.9 per cent of them being raised on a factory farm,

Even when I have gone to events or parties with the intention of not having any discussion about my lifestyle, someone who knows me will either bring up my veganism or I’ll be offered something to eat that I have to politely decline, which will then create the kind of conversation that I was trying to avoid.

I sat there sipping on my drink, explaining that we shouldn’t base our morality on the actions of wild animals